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Language Pedants Hew To An Oral Tradition Of Shibboleths That Have No Basis In Logic Or Style, That Have Been Defied By Great Writers For Centuries, And That Have Been Disavowed By Every Thoughtful Usage Manual.

-Steven Pinker

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Language Pedants Hew To

Steven Pinker

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Language Pedants Hew To An Oral Tradition Of Shibboleths That Have No Basis In Logic Or Style, That Have Been Defied By Great Writers For Centuries, And That Have Been Disavowed By Every Thoughtful Usage Manual.

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Dear White Fella When I Am Born I’m Black When I Grow Up I’m Black When I Am Sick I’m Black When I Go Out Ina Sun I’m Black When I Git Cold I’m Black When I Git Scared I’m Black And When I Die I’m Still Black. But You White Fella When You’re Born You’re Pink When You Grow Up You’re White When You Git Sick You’re Green When You Go Out Ina Sun You Go Red When You Git Cold You Go Blue When You Git Scared You’re Yellow And When You Die You’re Grey And You Got The Cheek To Call Me Coloured?

People Have Long Assumed That Violence Is Necessary For Political Change. Rulers Never Cede Power Voluntarily, The Argument Goes, So Progressives Have No Choice But To Contemplate The Use Of Force To Bring About A Better World, Mindful Of The Trade-off Between A Small Amount Of Violence Now And Acceptance Of An Unjust Status Quo Indefinitely.

Forcing Modern Speakers Of English To Not - Whoops, Not To Split An Infinitive Because It Isn't Done In Latin Makes About As Much Sense As Forcing Modern Residents Of England To Wear Laurels And Togas.

There Is No Society Ever Discovered In The Remotest Corner Of The World That Has Not Had Something That We Would Consider The Arts. Visual Arts - Decoration Of Surfaces And Bodies - Appears To Be A Human Universal.

Equity Feminism Is A Moral Doctrine About Equal Treatment That Makes No Commitments Regarding Open Empirical Issues In Psychology Or Biology.

Equal Treatment

I Never Outgrew My Conversion To Atheism At 13, But At Various Times Was A Serious Cultural Jew.

Today We Take It For Granted That War Happens In Smaller, Poorer And More Backward Countries.

Photography Is A Kind Of Virtual Reality, And It Helps If You Can Create The Illusion Of Being In An Interesting World.

The Doctrine Of The Sacredness Of The Soul Sounds Vaguely Uplifting, But In Fact Is Highly Malignant. It Discounts Life On Earth As Just A Temporary Phase That People Pass Through, Indeed, An Infinitesimal Fraction Of Their Existence…the Gradual Replacement Of Lives For Souls As The Locus Of Moral Value Was Helped Along By The Ascendency Of Skepticism And Reason

People Today Sometimes Get Uncomfortable With Empirical Claims That Seem To Clash With Their Political Assumptions, Often Because They Haven't Given Much Thought To The Connections.

Students Do Everything On Laptops These Days, So I Definitely Think Electronic Books Are A Trend That's Going To Expand.

Some People Believe That The Nuclear Bomb Should Be Awarded The Nobel Peace Prize, Since It Scared The Major Powers Away From War By Equating It With Doomsday.

For Example, Parents Who Talk A Lot To Their Children Have Kids With Better Language Skills, Parents Who Spank Have Children Who Grow Up To Be Violent, Parents Who Are Neither Too Authoritarian Or Too Lenient Have Children Who Are Well-adjusted, And So On.

If You Give People Literacy, Bad Ideas Can Be Attacked And Experiments Tried, And Lessons Will Accumulate.

However Much We Might Deplore The Profit Motive, Or Consumerist Values, If Everyone Just Wants I-pods We Would Probably Be Better Off Than If They Wanted Class Revolution.

I Like Ice Hockey. No One Is Ever Going To Ask Me To Write About That As A Metaphor For Life.

Many Artists And Scholars Have Pointed Out That Ultimately Art Depends On Human Nature.

The Stirrings Of Morality Emerge Early In Childhood. Toddlers Spontaneously Offer Toys And Help To Others And Try To Comfort People They See In Distress.

Modern Biblical Scholars Have Established That The Bible Is A Wiki. It Was Compiled Over Half A Millennium From Writers With Different Styles, Dialects, Character Names, And Conceptions Of God And Was Subjected To Haphazard Editing That Left It With Many Contradictions, Duplications And Non-sequiturs.

Language Surely Does Affect Our Thoughts, Rather Than Just Labeling Them For The Sake Of Labeling Them. Most Obviously, Language Is The Conduit Through Which People Share Their Thoughts And Intentions And Thereby Acquire The Knowledge, Customs, And Values Of Those Around Them."

Reason Is Non-negotiable. Try To Argue Against It, Or To Exclude It From Some Realm Of Knowledge, And You've Already Lost The Argument, Because You're Using Reason To Make Your Case. ... We Don't "believe" In Reason.

Whenever You Speak To Someone, You Are Presuming The Two Of You Have A Certain Degree Of Familiarity - Which Your Words Might Alter. So Every Sentence Has To Do Two Things At Once: Convey A Message And Continue To Negotiate That Relationship.

Natural Selection Is Not The Only Process That Changes Organisms Over Time. But Is The Only Process That Seemingly Designs Organisms Over Time.

I Think The Reason That Swearing Is Both So Offensive And So Attractive Is That It Is A Way To Push People's Emotional Buttons, And Especially Their Negative Emotional Buttons. Because Words Soak Up Emotional Connotations And Are Processed Involuntarily By The Listener, You Can't Will Yourself Not To Treat The Word In Terms Of What It Means.

Writers Acquire Their Technique By Spotting, Savoring, And Reverse-engineering Examples Of Good Prose.

In Many Muslim Countries, Witchcraft Is Not Only On The Books As A Crime, But Is Commonly Prosecuted. In 2009, For Example, Saudi Arabia Convicted A Man For Carrying A Phone Booklet With Characters In An Alphabet From His Native Eritrea, Which The Police Interpreted As Occult Symbols. He Was Lashed Three Hundred Times And Imprisoned For More Than Three Years.

Jews Are Known For Many Things, But Strength, Swiftness, And Agility Are Not Among Them. There Is One Trait, As Controversial As It Is Familiar, For Which Jews Are Above All Known, And That Is Shrewdness In Business.

Morality Is Not Just Any Old Topic In Psychology But Close To Our Conception Of The Meaning Of Life. Moral Goodness Is What Gives Each Of Us The Sense That We Are Worthy Human Beings.

Meaning Of Life

We Are Visual Creatures. Visual Things Stay Put, Whereas Sounds Fade.

Pre-state Societies Were Far More Violent Than Our Own.

Something About The Topic Of Consciousness Makes People, Like The White Queen In Through The Looking Glass, Believe Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast.

Impossible Things

As Many Political Writers Have Pointed Out, Commitment To Political Equality Is Not An Empirical Claim That People Are Clones.

Why Do People Believe That There Are Dangerous Implications Of The Idea That The Mind Is A Product Of The Brain, That The Brain Is Organized In Part By The Genome, And That The Genome Was Shaped By Natural Selection?

Probably Hobbes Got It Right When He Said That A Leviathan, A Third Party With A Monopoly On The Use Of Legitimate Use Of Force In A Territory, Might Be Among The Biggest Violence Reduction Techniques Ever Invented.

By Exploring The Political And Moral Colorings Of Discoveries About What Makes Us Tick, We Can Have A More Honest Science And A Less Fearful Intellectual Milieu.

A Successful Learner, . . . Must Be Constrained To Draw Some Conclusions From The Input And Not Others.

If The Myth Of Pure Evil Is That Evil Is Committed With The Intention Of Causing Harm And An Absence Of Moral Considerations, Then It Applies To Very Few Acts Of So-called 'pure Evil' Because Most Evildoers Believe What They Are Doing Is Forgivable Or Justifiable.

If Crime Is Going Down, You Shouldn't Be Increasing Resources For Crime Prevention. Or You Should Be Taking Note Of What Has Worked And Concentrate The Crime-prevention Methods On Policies That Have A Track Record Of Success.

Since The Point Of Erotica Is To Offer The Consumer Sexual Experiences Without Having To Compromise With The Demands Of The Other Sex, It Is A Window Into Each Sex's Unalloyed Desires. Pornography For Men Is Visual, Anatomical, Impulsive, Floridly Promiscuous And Devoid Of Context And Character. Erotica For Women Is Far More Likely To Be Verbal, Psychological, Reflective, Serially Monogamous And Rich In Context And Character. Men Fantasise About Copulating With Bodies; Women Fantasise About Making Love To People.

Language Is A Window Into Human Nature, But It Is Also A Fistula, An Open Wound Through Which We're Exposed To An Infectious World.

It's Likely That Taboo Words Are Stored In The Right Hemisphere Of The Brain. Massive Left Hemisphere Strokes Or The Entire Surgical Removal Of The Left Hemisphere Can Leave People With No Articulate Speech Other Than The Ability To Swear, Spout Cliches And Song Lyrics.

Disgust Is Intuitive Microbiology

Of Course Genes Can’t Pull The Levers Of Our Behavior Directly. But They Affect The Wiring And Workings Of The Brain, And The Brain Is The Seat Of Our Drives, Temperaments And Patterns Of Thought. Each Of Us Is Dealt A Unique Hand Of Tastes And Aptitudes, Like Curiosity, Ambition, Empathy, A Thirst For Novelty Or For Security, A Comfort Level With The Social Or The Mechanical Or The Abstract. Some Opportunities We Come Across Click With Our Constitutions And Set Us Along A Path In Life.

Technology, Ideology, And Social And Cultural Changes Periodically Throw Out New Forms Of Violence For Humanity To Contend With.

Morality, Then, Is Not A Set Of Arbitrary Regulations Dictated By A Vengeful Deity And Written Down In A Book; Nor Is It The Custom Of A Particular Culture Or Tribe. It Is A Consequence Of The Interchangeability Of Perspectives And The Opportunity The World Provides For Positive-sum Games.

All Over The World, Belief In The Supernatural Has Authorised The Sacrifice Of People To Propitiate Bloodthirsty Gods, And The Murder Of Witches For Their Malevolent Powers.

Why Are Empirical Questions About How The Mind Works So Weighted Down With Political And Moral And Emotional Baggage?

One Of My Favourite Kinds Of Movie Is The American Picaresque, In Which The Characters Make Their Way Across The Country, Learning About Life Against The Gorgeous Backdrops Of That Vast Land.

Journalists Say That When A Dog Bites A Man, That Is Not News, But When A Man Bites A Dog, That Is News ... Thanks To The Mathematics Of Combinatorics, We Will Never Run Out Of News.

The Elegant Study... Is Consistent With The Themes Of Modern Cognitive Neuroscience . Every Aspect Of Thought And Emotion Is Rooted In Brain Structure And Function, Including Many Psychological Disorders And, Presumably, Genius. The Study Confirms That The Brain Is A Modular System Comprising Multiple Intelligences, Mostly Nonverbal.

Psychological Disorders

Evolutionary Psychologists Seem To Want To Unmask Our Noblest Motives As Ultimately Self-interested - To Show That Our Love For Children, Compassion For The Unfortunate And Sense Of Justice Are Just Tactics In A Darwinian Struggle To Perpetuate Our Genes.

As Long As Your Ideology Identifies The Main Source Of The World's Ills As A Definable Group, It Opens The World Up To Genocide.

The Indispensability Of Reason Does Not Imply That Individual People Are Always Rational Or Are Unswayed By Passion And Illusion. It Only Means That People Are Capable Of Reason, And That A Community Of People Who Choose To Perfect This Faculty And To Exercise It Openly And Fairly Can Collectively Reason Their Way To Sounder Conclusions In The Long Run. As Lincoln Observed, You Can Fool All Of The People Some Of The Time, And You Can Fool Some Of The People All Of The Time, But You Can't Fool All Of The People All Of The Time.

The Likelihood That Inborn Differences Are One Contributor To Social Status Does Not Mean That It Is The Only Contributor.

Just As Blueprints Don't Necessarily Specify Blue Buildings, Selfish Genes Don't Necessarily Specify Selfish Organisms. As We Shall See, Sometimes The Most Selfish Thing A Gene Can Do Is Build A Selfless Brain. Genes Are A Play Within A Play, Not The Interior Monologue Of The Players.

Overcoming Naive Impressions To Figure Out How Things Really Work Is One Of Humanity's Highest Callings.

Humans Are So Innately Hardwired For Language That They Can No More Suppress Their Ability To Learn And Use Language Than They Can Suppress The Instinct To Pull A Hand Back From A Hot Surface.

Thinking Is A Physical Process, The Human Brain Is Not Exempt From Evolution

We Adults Protect Ourselves With Laws, Police, Workplace Regulations And Social Norms And There Is No Conceivable Reason Why Children Should Be Left More Vulnerable, Other That Laziness Or Callousness In Considering What Life Is Like From Their Point Of View.

Education Is A Technology That Tries To Make Up For What The Human Mind Is Innately Bad At. Children Don't Have To Go To School To Learn How To Walk, Talk, Recognize Objects, Or Remember The Personalities Of Their Friends, Even Though These Tasks Are Much Harder Than Reading, Adding, Or Remembering Dates In History. They Do Have To Go To School To Learn Written Language, Arithmetic, And Science, Because Those Bodies Of Knowledge And Skill Were Invented Too Recently For Any Species-wide Knack For Them To Have Evolved.

Working Out What It Would Take To Program Goodness Into A Robot Shows Not Only How Much Machinery It Takes To Be Good But How Slippery The Concept Of Goodness Is To Start With.

Cognitive Psychology Has Shown That The Mind Best Understands Facts When They Are Woven Into A Conceptual Fabric, Such As A Narrative, Mental Map, Or Intuitive Theory. Disconnected Facts In The Mind Are Like Unlinked Pages On The Web: They Might As Well Not Exist.

The More You Think About And Interact With Other People, The More You Realize That It Is Untenable To Privilege Your Interests Over Theirs, At Least Not If You Want Them To Listen To You. You Can’t Say That My Interests Are Special Compared To Yours Any More Than You Can Say That The Particular Spot That I Am Standing On Is A Unique Part Of The Universe Because I Happen To Be Standing On It That Very Minute.

Evolutionarily Speaking, There Is Seldom Any Mystery In Why We Seek The Goals We Seek — Why, For Example, People Would Rather Make Love With An Attractive Partner Than Get A Slap On The Belly With A Wet Fish.

Cognitive Psychology Tells Us That The Unaided Human Mind Is Vulnerable To Many Fallacies And Illusions Because Of Its Reliance On Its Memory For Vivid Anecdotes Rather Than Systematic Statistics.

Language Pedants Hew To An Oral Tradition Of Shibboleths That Have No Basis In Logic Or Style, That Have Been Defied By Great Writers For Centuries, And That Have Been Disavowed By Every Thoughtful Usage Manual.

Human Nature Is Complex. Even If We Do Have Inclinations Toward Violence, We Also Have Inclination To Empathy, To Cooperation, To Self-control.

Economic Libertarians And Christian Evangelicals, United By Their Common Enemy, Are Strange Bedfellows In Today's Republican Party, Just As The Two Georges - The Archconservative Wallace And The Uberliberal Mcgovern - Found Themselves In The Same Democratic Party In 1972.

What A Dull Universe It Would Be If Everything In It Conformed To Our Expectations, If It Held Nothing To Surprise Or Baffle Us Or Confound Our Common Sense. A Century Ago No One Foresaw The Existence Of Black Holes, An Expanding Universe, Oceans On Jupiter's Moons, Or Dna. What Could Be More Enriching Than To Know That We Share A Common Origin With All Living Things, That We Are Kin To Chimpanzees, Redwoods And Mollusks? And Isn't It A Source Of Wonder To Realize That The Iron In Our Blood And The Calcium In Our Bones Were Created In The Bellies Of Supernovas?

Reading Is A Technology For Perspective-taking. When Someone Else's Thoughts Are In Your Head, You Are Observing The World From That Person's Vantage Point.

I Suspect Music Is Auditory Cheesecake, An Exquisite Confection Crafted To Tickle The Sensitive Spots Of... Our Mental Faculties.

Of Course The Theory Of Evolution Would Be Vacuous If It Offered A Glib Explanation For Every Inexplicable Act.

Theory Of Evolution

We Can Shape Events In Each Other's Brains With Exquisite Precision.

A Decent Government With An Effective, But Not Gratuitously Violent, Police Force And A Fair Court System Are Essential. This Deters And Incapacitates Psychopaths, Bullies And Hotheads - And If It Earns The Confidence Of The People, They Don't Have To Become Violent In Self-defence.

The Strongest Argument Against Totalitarianism May Be A Recognition Of A Universal Human Nature; That All Humans Have Innate Desires For Life, Liberty And The Pursuit Of Happiness. The Doctrine Of The Blank Slate... Is A Totalitarian's Dream.

Pursuit Of Happiness

Maybe Philosophical Problems Are Hard Not Because They Are Divine Or Irreducible Or Meaningless Or Workaday Science, But Because The Mind Of Homo Sapiens Lacks The Cognitive Equipment To Solve Them. We Are Organisms, Not Angels, And Our Minds Are Organs, Not Pipelines To The Truth. Our Minds Evolved By Natural Selection To Solve Problems That Were Life-and-death Matters To Our Ancestors, Not To Commune With Correctness Ot To Answer Any Question We Are Capable Of Asking.

'capitalism' Is A Dirty Word For Many Intellectuals, But There Are A Number Of Studies Showing That Open Economies And Free Trade Are Negatively Correlated With Genocide And War.

If Anything, Powerpoint, If Used Well, Would Ideally Reflect The Way We Think.

Most Wars Are Not Fought Over Shortages Of Resources Such As Food And Water, But Rather Over Conquest, Revenge, And Ideology.

Societies That Empower Women Are Less Violent In Every Way.

Empowering Women

The Problem With The Emotions Is Not That They Are Untamed Forces Or Vestiges Of Our Animal Past; It Is That They Were Designed To Propagate Copies Of The Genes That Built Them Rather Than To Promote Happiness, Wisdom, Or Moral Values.

Statisticians Tell Us That People Underestimate The Sheer Number Of Coincidences That Are Bound To Happen In A World Governed By Chance.

Of Course, Genes Can't Pull The Levers Of Our Behavior Directly. But They Affect The Wiring And Workings Of The Brain, And The Brain Is The Seat Of Our Drives, Temperaments And Patterns Of Thought.

Morality Comes From A Commitment To Treat Other As We Wish To Be Treated, Which Follows From The Realization That None Of Us Is The Sole Occupant Of The Universe.

Mother Teresa Was The Very Embodiment Of Saintliness: White-clad, Sad-eyed, Ascetic And Often Photographed With The Wretched Of The Earth.

Dominance In An Adaptation To Anarchy And It Serves No Purpose In A Society That Has Undergone A Civilising Process Or In An International System Regulated By Agreements And Norms. Anything That Deflates The Concept Of Dominance Is Likely To Drive Down The Frequency Of Fights Between Individuals And Wars.

The More You Think About And Interact With Other People, The More You Realize That It Is Untenable To Privilege Your Interests Over Theirs.

Evolution Is An Indispensable Component Of Any Satisfying Explanation Of Our Psychology.

I Think This Confusion Leads Intellectuals And Artists Themselves To Believe That The Elite Arts And Humanities Are A Kind Of Higher, Exalted Form Of Human Endeavor.

The Last 100 Years Of Research Into The Human Brain...sees The Brain As An Organ That Works By Physical Principles Just Like The Other Organs In The Body...our Emotions And Higher Callings, Such As Religion, As Well As Our Grubby Low-level Physical Systems Like Stereo Vision And Motor Control, Are Products Of A Machine.

The Rules Of Friendship Are Tacit, Unconscious; They Are Not Rational. In Business, Though, You Have To Think Rationally.

You Could Think Of An Ecosystem As A Bunch Of Antagonistic Arms Races, Almost: Everything That An Animal Depends Upon For Food Is The Body Part Of Some Other Animal Or Plant Who Would Just As Soon Keep That Body Part For Itself.

Obviously No Language Is Innate. Take Any Kid From Any Race, Bring Them Up In Any Culture And They Will Learn The Language Equally Quickly. So No Particular Language Is In The Genes. But What Might Be In The Genes Is The Ability To Acquire Language.

Trivers, Pursuing His Theory Of The Emotions To Its Logical Conclusion, Notes That In A World Of Walking Lie Detectors The Best Strategy Is To Believe Your Own Lies. You Can’t Leak Your Hidden Intentions If You Don’t Think They Are Your Intentions. According To His Theory Of Self-deception, The Conscious Mind Sometimes Hides The Truth From Itself The Better To Hide It From Others. But The Truth Is Useful, So It Should Be Registered Somewhere In The Mind, Walled Off From The Parts That Interact With Other People.

But In Most Cases Even The Possibility That The Correlations Reflect Shared Genes Is Taboo.

I Do Look For Openings Where I Can Overturn Popular Misconceptions, But Unlike Christopher Hitchens, I Am Neither A Contrarian Nor A Lone Heretic. I Like To Have A Significant Number Of Academics Watching My Back.

According To A Recent Study Of The Brains Of Identical And Fraternal Twins, Differences In The Amount Of Gray Matter In The Frontal Lobes Are Not Only Genetically Influenced But Are Significantly Correlated With Differences In Intelligence.

We're Living In Primate Heaven. We're Warm, Dry, We're Not Hungry, We Don't Have Fleas And Ticks And Infections. So Why Are We So Miserable?

As Technology Accumulates And People In More Parts Of The Planet Become Interdependent, The Hatred Between Them Tends To Decrease, For The Simple Reason That You Can't Kill Someone And Trade With Him Too.

I Think That A Failure Of Statistical Thinking Is The Major Intellectual Shortcoming Of Our Universities, Journalism And Intellectual Culture.

Since Violence Is Largely A Male Pastime, Cultures That Empower Women Tend To Move Away From The Glorification Of Violence And Are Less Likely To Breed Dangerous Subcultures Of Rootless Young Men.

An Ideology Can Provide A Satisfying Narrative That Explains Chaotic Events And Collective Misfortunes In A Way That Flatters The Virtue And Competence Of Believers, While Being Vague Or Conspiratorial Enough To Withstand Skeptical Scrutiny.

Fiction Is Empathy Technology.

I Have Never Been A Fan Of Science Fiction. For Me, Fiction Has To Explore The Combinatorial Possibilities Of People Interacting Under The Constraints Imposed By Our Biology And History. When An Author Is Free To Suspend The Constraints, It's Tennis Without A Net.

The Supposedly Immaterial Soul, We Now Know, Can Be Bisected With A Knife, Altered By Chemicals, Started Or Stopped By Electricity, And Extinguished By A Sharp Blow Or By Insufficient Oxygen.

An Eye For Beauty Locks Onto Faces That Show Signs Of Health And Fertility - Just As One Would Predict If It Had Evolved To Help The Beholder Find The Fittest Mate.

I Don't Think Aggression Works Like Thirst Or Sleep. I Think Aggression Is More Elicited By Particular Situations. I Think It Can Be Mitigated.

Anything That Makes It Easier To Imagine Trading Places With Someone Else Increases Your Moral Consideration For That Other Person.

There's A Misconception That Survival Of The Fittest Means Survival Of The Most Aggressive. The Adjective 'darwinian' Used To Refer To Ruthless Competition; You Used To Read That In Business Journals. But That's Not What Darwinian Means To A Biologist; It's Whatever Leads To Reproductive Success.

People Are Under The Impression That Dictionaries Legislate Language. What A Dictionary Does Is Keep Track Of Usages Over Time.

Conventions Are Unstated Agreements Within A Community To Abide By A Single Way Of Doing Things - Not Because There Is Any Inherent Advantage To The Choice, But Because There Is An Advantage To Everyone Making The Same Choice.

One Of The Things That People Complain About Is Loneliness, Disconnectedness. If You Live In A Society Where Your Life Is Rarely Threatened And Most Of Your Relationships Are More On An Economic Exchange Basis, Then This Could Leave People Feeling Less Connected.

Terrorist Bombings, Like Rampage Shootings, Are Events That Maximize The Amount Of Publicity Per Amount Of Damage. That's Why People Do Them, Because They Know They Will Set Off A Media Frenzy.

Most Intellectuals Today Have A Phobia Of Any Explanation Of The Mind That Invokes Genetics.

Climate Change Could Produce A Lot Of Misery And Waste Without Necessarily Leading To Large-scale Armed Conflict, Which Depends More On Ideology And Bad Governance Than On Resource Scarcity.

Heritability Pertains To The Entirety Of The Genome, Not To A Single Gene.

Consciousness Surely Does Not Depend On Language. Babies, Many Animals, And Patients Robbed Of Speech By Brain Damage Are Not Insensate Robots; They Have Reactions Like Ours That Indicate That Someone's Home.

A Word Is An Arbitrary Label - That's The Foundation Of Linguistics. But Many People Think Otherwise. They Believe In Word Magic: That Uttering A Spell, Incantation, Curse, Or Prayer Can Change The World. Don't Snicker: Would You Ever Say, 'nothing Has Gone Wrong Yet' Without Looking For Wood To Knock?

The Idea That Children Are Passive Repositories To Be Shaped By Their Parents Has Been Massively Overstated. A Child's Peer Group Is A Far Greater Determinant Of Its Development And Achievements Than Parental Aspiration.

People Consider The Harms They Inflict To Be Justified And Forgettable, And The Harms They Suffer To Be Unprovoked And Grievous.

The Mind Is A Neural Computer

We Often Feel That A Clever Aphorism Captures A Truth That Would Require Pages To Defend In Any Other Way.

I Think A Lot Of Moral Debates Are Not Over What Is The Basis Of Justice, But Who Gets A Ticket To Play In The Game.

The Art Of Photography Is All About Directing The Attention Of The Viewer.

If We Are Not To Abandon Values Such As Peace And Equality, Or Our Commitments To Science And Truth, Then We Must Pry These Values Away From Claims About Our Psychological Makeup That Are Vulnerable To Being Proven False.

For One Thing, Before The 20th Century, There Were Plenty Of Genocides. We Tend To Forget About Them, Partly Because They Weren't As Well Documented And Partly Because, Until Recently, People Didn't Care. We Used Euphemisms Like 'sackings' And 'sieges' Instead Of Calling Them 'genocides.'

By All Measures Men Are The More Violent Gender.

Like The Early Days Of The Internet, The Dawn Of Personal Genomics Promises Benefits And Pitfalls That No One Can Foresee.

If You Look In General At People Who Live In Anarchy, They Have Quite High Rates Of Death From Either Homicide Or Warfare Or Both. Anarchy Is One Of The Main Reasons For Violence, And It May Be The Most Important.

My Opinions About Human Nature Are Shared By Many Psychologists, Linguists, And Biologists, Not To Mention Philosophers And Scholars Going Back Centuries.

Evolutionary Psychology Is One Of Four Sciences That Are Bringing Human Nature Back Into The Picture.

Violent Movements Attract Thugs And Firebrands Who Enjoy The Mayhem. Violent Tactics Provide A Pretext For Retaliation By The Enemy And Alienate Third Parties Who Might Otherwise Support The Movement.

Nature Is A Hanging Judge," Goes An Old Saying. Many Tragedies Come From Our Physical And Cognitive Makeup. Our Bodies Are Extraordinarily Improbable Arrangements Of Matter, With Many Ways For Things To Go Wrong And Only A Few Ways For Things To Go Right. We Are Certain To Die, And Smart Enough To Know It. Our Minds Are Adapted To A World That No Longer Exists, Prone To Misunderstandings Correctable Only By Arduous Education, And Condemned To Perplexity About The Deepest Questions We Can Ascertain.

Paris Hilton, It Turns Out, Is Related To Fellow Celebrity Jailbirds Zsa Zsa Gabor And G. Gordon Liddy.

As Every Student In Philosophy 101 Learns, Nothing Can Force Me To Believe That Anyone Except Me Is Conscious. This Power To Deny That Other People Have Feelings Is Not Just An Academic Exercise But An All-too-common Vice, As We See In The Long History Of Human Cruelty.

When It Comes To Explaining Human Thought And Behavior, The Possibility That Heredity Plays Any Role At All Still Has The Power To Shock. To Acknowledge Human Nature, Many Think, Is To Endorse Racism, Sexism, War, Greed, Genocide, Nihilism, Reactionary Politics, And Neglect Of Children And The Disadvantaged. Any Claim That The Mind Has An Innate Organization Strikes People Not As A Hypothesis That Might Be Incorrect But As A Thought It Is Immoral To Think.

Broadly Speaking, The Southern And Western Desert And Mountain States Will Vote For The Candidate Who Endorses An Aggressive Military, A Role For Religion In Public Life, Laissez-faire Economic Policies, Private Ownership Of Guns And Relaxed Conditions For Using Them, Less Regulation And Taxation, And A Valorization Of The Traditional Family.

I Would Argue That Nothing Gives Life More Purpose Than The Realization That Every Moment Of Consciousness Is A Precious And Fragile Gift.

Effective Education May Also Require Co-opting Old Faculties To Deal With New Demands. . . Because Much Of The Content Of Education Is Not Cognitively Natural, The Process Of Mastering It May Not Always Be Easy And Pleasant, Notwithstanding The Mantra That Learning Is Fun.

What Is True For The Emotions May Also Be True For The Intellect. Some Of Our Perplexities May Come From A Mismatch Between The Purposes For Which Our Cognitive Faculties Evolved And The Purposes To Which We Put Them Today.

When A Scientist Considers All High-tech Mental Machinery Needed To Arrange Words Into Ordinary Sentences, Prescriptive Rules Are, At Best, Inconsequential Little Decorations. The Very Fact That They Have To Be Drilled Shows That They Are Alien To The Natural Workings Of The Language System. One Can Choose To Obsess Over Prescriptive Rules, But They Have No More To Do With Language Than The Criteria For Judging Cats At A Cat Show Have To Do With Mammalian Biology.

I Get Drawn In When I Feel There Is Something Deep And Mysterious Going On Beneath The Surface Of Something.

Beneath The Surface

I Think Students Should Know Something About Religion As A Historical Phenomenon, In The Same Way That They Should Know Something About Socialism And Humanism And The Other Great Ideas That Have Shaped Political Philosophies And Therefore The Course Of Human Events.

Commerce, Trade And Exchange Make Other People More Valuable Alive Than Dead, And Mean That People Try To Anticipate What The Other Guy Needs And Wants. It Engages The Mechanisms Of Reciprocal Altruism, As The Evolutionary Biologists Call It, As Opposed To Raw Dominance.

Personality And Socialization Aren't The Same Thing.

In The Speech Sound Wave, One Word Runs Into The Next Seamlessly; There Are No Little Silences Between Spoken Words The Way There Are White Spaces Between Written Words. We Simply Hallucinate Word Boundaries When We Reach The End Of A Stretch Of Sound That Matches Some Entry In Our Mental Dictionary.

By Denying People's Sense Of Visual Beauty In Painting And Sculpture , Melody In Music , Meter And Rhyme In Poetry , Plot And Narrative And Character In Fiction , The Elite Arts Wrote Off The Vast Majority Of Their Audience . They Purposely Excluded People Who Approach Art In Part For Pleasure And Edification In Favour Of Social One-upmanship And An Ever-narrowing, In-crowd Elite.

But The 20th Century Suffered "two" Ideologies That Led To Genocides. The Other One, Marxism, Had No Use For Race, Didn't Believe In Genes And Denied That Human Nature Was A Meaningful Concept. Clearly, It's Not An Emphasis On Genes Or Evolution That Is Dangerous. It's The Desire To Remake Humanity By Coercive Means (eugenics Or Social Engineering) And The Belief That Humanity Advances Through A Struggle In Which Superior Groups (race Or Classes) Triumph Over Inferior Ones.

Language Mavens Commonly Confuse Their Own Peeves With A Worsening Of The Language.

People Do Not Think In English Or Chinese Or Apache; They Think In A Language Of Thought. This Language Of Thought Probably Looks A Bit Like All These Languagesbut Compared With Any Given Language, Mentalese Must Be Richer In Some Ways And Simpler In Others.

The Great Appeal Of The Doctrine That The Mind Is A Blank Slate Is The Simple Mathematical Fact That Zero Equals Zero.

With Violence, As With So Many Other Concerns, Human Nature Is The Problem, But Human Nature Is Also The Solution.

You Wouldn't Believe The Kind Of Hate Mail I Get About My Work On Irregular Verbs.

Much Of What Is Today Called "social Criticism" Consists Of Members Of The Upper Classes Denouncing The Tastes Of The Lower Classes (bawdy Entertainment, Fast Food, Plentiful Consumer Goods) While Considering Themselves Egalitarians.

When People Talk, They Lay Lines On Each Other, Do A Lot Of Role Playing, Sidestep, Shilly-shally And Engage In All Manner Of Vagueness And Innuendo. We Do This And Expect Others To Do It, Yet At The Same Time We Profess To Long For The Plain Truth, For People To Say What They Mean, Simple As That. Such Hypocrisy Is A Human Universal.

My Laptop Has Freed Me To Travel.

The Fact That People Can Forget These Simple Truths When Intellectualizing About Children Shows How Far Modern Doctrines Have Taken Us. They Make It Easy To Think Of Children As Lumps Of Putty To Be Shaped Instead Of Partners In A Human Relationship.

Commerce Is A Noble Profession, And Jews Should Get Over Any Self-hatred They Might Harbor From Contemplating The Capitalist Spirit Of Diaspora Judaism.

The Human Moral Sense Can Excuse Any Atrocity In The Minds Of Those Who Commit It, And It Furnishes Them With Motives For Acts Of Violence That Bring Them No Tangible Benefit.

Art Works Because It Appeals To Certain Faculties Of The Mind. Music Depends On Details Of The Auditory System, Painting And Sculpture On The Visual System. Poetry And Literature Depend On Language.

There's A Common Criticism Of Evolutionary Psychology That It's Fatalistic And It Dooms Us To Eternal Strife, 'why Even Try To Work Toward Peace If We're Just Bloody Killer Apes And Violence Is In Our Genes?'

Regardless Of Its Causes, Thoughtlessly Blaming The Present Is A Weakness Which, Even If It Is Never Outlawed, Ought To Be Resisted. Though Commonly Flaunted As A Sign Of Sophistication, It Can Be An Opportunity For One-upmanship And An Excuse For Misanthropy, Especially Against The Young.

[napoleon Deployed] Every Available Resource To Inflict All-out Defeats On [his] Enemies.

The Costs Of An Ignorance Of Science Are Nor Just Practical Ones Like Misbegotten Policies, Forgone Cures, And A Unilateral Disarmament In National Competitiveness. There Is A Moral Cost As Well. It Is An Astonishing Fact About Our Species That We Understand So Much About The History Of The Universe. The Forces That Make It Tick, The Stuff It's Made Of; The Origin Of Living Things, And The Machinery Of Life. A Failure To Nurture This Knowledge Shows A Philistine Indifference To The Magnificent Achievements Humanity Is Capable Of; Like Allowing A Great Work Of Art To Molder In A Warehouse.

No One Knows What The Nongenetic Causes Of Individuality Are. Perhaps People Are Shaped By Modifications Of Genes That Take Place After Conception, Or By Haphazard Fluctuations In The Chemical Soup In The Womb Or The Wiring Up Of The Brain Or The Expression Of The Genes Themselves.

People Know There Is A Difference Between What You Do And What You Accept. There Is A Difference Between Me Knowing That People Swear, Me Hearing People Swear And Me Swearing, And Everyone Accepting That This Is Something You Can Do As Much As You Like.

As An Experimental Psychologist, I Have Been Trained Not To Believe Anything Unless It Can Be Demonstrated In The Laboratory On Rats Or Sophomores.

The Stuff Of Life Turned Out To Be Not A Quivering, Glowing, Wondrous Gel But A Contraption Of Tiny Jigs, Springs, Hinges, Rods, Sheets, Magnets, Zippers, And Trapdoors, Assembled By A Data Tape Whose Information Is Copied, Downloaded And Scanned.

Plants Can't Very Well Defend Themselves By Their Behavior, So They Resort To Chemical Warfare, And Plants Are Saturated With Toxins And Irritants To Deter Creatures Like Us Who Want To Eat Them.

M.i.t. Has A Reputation For Turning Out Dilberts. They May Be Brilliant In What They Do, But No One Can Understand What They Say.

In Societies No Less Than Individuals, Acknowledging Our Limitations May Ultimately Be More Humane Than Denying Them.

The Linguistic Clumsiness Of Tourists And Students Might Be The Price We Pay For The Linguistic Genius We Displayed As Babies, Just As The Decrepitude Of Age In The Price We Pay For The Vigor Of Youth.

Parents Provide Their Children With Genes As Well As An Environment, So The Fact That Talkative Parents Have Kids With Good Language Skills Could Simply Mean That And That The Same Genes That Make Parents Talkative Make Children Articulate.

I Teach Classes 28 Weeks Of The Year, But The Rest Of The Time I Do Research And Write Books.

I Think That Communism Was A Major Force For Violence For More Than 100 Years, Because It Was Built Into Its Ideology - That Progress Comes Through Class Struggle, Often Violent.

Academics Lack Perspective. In A Debate On Whether The World Is Round, They Would Argue, 'no,' Because It's An Oblate Spheroid. They Suffer From 'the Curse Of Knowledge': The Inability To Imagine What It's Like Not To Know Something That They Know.

Photography Is A Demanding Action Sport. The Light Can Change So Quickly. I Often Find Myself Sprinting So That I Can Catch The Perfect Light Falling On A Photogenic Subject.

One Can Choose To Obsess Over Prescriptive Rules, But They Have No More To Do With Human Language Than The Criteria For Judging Cats At A Cat Show Have To Do With Mammalian Biology.

Babies Are Born With The Instinct To Speak, The Way Spiders Are Born With The Instinct To Spin Webs. You Don't Need To Train Babies To Speak; They Just Do. But Reading Is Different.

If You Aren't Just Brought Up In Your Tribe But Interact With Other People Either Directly Or Vicariously, Through Journalism And Literature, You See What Life Is Like From Other Points Of View And Are Less Likely To Demonize Them Or Dehumanize Others And More Likely To Empathize With Them.

The World Has Far Too Much Morality.

Everyone's Pedigree Merges Into Everyone Else's Pedigree. So If You Go Back Far Enough, Everyone Is Related.

We Will Never Have A Perfect World, But It's Not Romantic Or Naive To Work Toward A Better One.

A Perfect World

So No, It's Not All In The Genes, But What Isn't In The Genes Isn't In The Family Environment Either. It Can't Be Explained In Terms Of The Overall Personalities Or The Child-rearing Practices Of Parents.

One Of The Perks Of Being A Psychologist Is Access To Tools That Allow You To Carry Out The Injunction To Know Thyself.

You Know That When Irving Puts The Dog In The Car, It Is No Longer In The Yard. When Edna Goes To Church, Her Head Goes With Her. If Doug Is In The House, He Must Have Gone Through Some Opening Unless He Was Born There And Never Left. If Sheila Is Alive At 9 A.m. And Is Alive At 5 P.m., She Was Also Alive At Noon. Zebras In The Wild Never Wear Underwear. Opening A Jar Of A New Brand Of Peanut Butter Will Not Vaporize The House. People Never Shove Meat Thermometers In Their Ears. A Gerbil Is Smaller Than Mt. Kilimanjaro.

Feminism As A Movement For Political And Social Equity Is Important, But Feminism As An Academic Clique Committed To Eccentric Doctrines About Human Nature Is Not. Eliminating Discrimination Against Women Is Important, But Believing That Women And Men Are Born With Indistinguishable Minds Is Not. Freedom Of Choice Is Important, But Ensuring That Women Make Up Exactly 50 Percent Of All Professions Is Not. And Eliminating Sexual Assaults Is Important, But Advancing The Theory That Rapists Are Doing Their Part In A Vast Male Conspiracy Is Not.

I Try To Jog In Every City I Visit, And I Particularly Enjoy Harbour-front Paths That Let Me Ogle Big Ships, Railroad Bridges And The Ruins Of Factories And Warehouses.

For All The Tribulations In Our Lives, For All The Troubles That Remain In The World, The Decline Of Violence Is An Accomplishment That We Can Savor - And An Impetus To Cherish The Forces Of Civilization And Enlightenment That Made It Possible.

In Our Society, The Best Predictor Of A Man's Wealth Is His Wife's Looks, And The Best Predictor Of A Woman's Looks Is Her Husband's Wealth.

A...reason We Are So-so Scientists Is That Our Brains Were Shaped For Fitness, Not For Truth. Sometimes Truth Is Adaptive, But Sometimes It Is Not.

In Fact, Without A Specification Of A Creature's Goals, The Very Idea Of Intelligence Is Meaningless. A Toadstool Could Be Given A Genius Award For Accomplishing With Pinpoint Precision And Unerring Reliability, The Feat Of Sitting Exactly Where It Is Sitting. Nothing Would Prevent Us From Agreeing With The Cognitive Scientist Zenon Pylyshyn That Rocks Are Smarter Than Cats Because Rocks Have The Sense To Go Away When You Kick Them.

Though Knowledge Itself Increasingly Ignores Boundaries Between Fields, Professors Are Apt To Organize Their Pedagogy Around The Methods And History Of Their Academic Subculture Rather Than Some Coherent Topic In The World.

In The Past Two Decades Anthropologists Have Gathered Data On Life And Death In Pre-state Societies Rather Than Accepting The Warm And Fuzzy Stereotypes. What Did They Find? In A Nutshell: Hobbes Was Right, Rousseau Was Wrong.

The Foundation Of Individual Rights Is The Assumption That People Have Wants And Needs And Are Authorities On What Those Wants And Needs Are. If People's Stated Desires Were Just Some Kind Of Erasable Inscription Or Reprogrammable Brainwashing, Any Atrocity Could Be Justified.

There's Guilt About Our Treatment Of Native Peoples In Modern Intellectual Life, And An Unwillingness To Acknowledge There Could Be Anything Good About Western Culture.

Western Culture

I Don't Consider Myself To Be That Radical A Thinker.

After Their Return From Babylon, The Practice Of Human Sacrifice Died Out Among The Jews, But Survived As An Ideal In One Of Its Break-away Sects, Which Believed That God Accepted The Torture-sacrifice Of An Innocent Man In Exchange For Not Visiting A Worse Fate On The Rest Of Humanity. The Sect Is Called Christianity.

The Brain Is Not A Bag Of Traits. It's Startlingly Complex. There Are Few Or No Single Genes With A Consistent Effect On The Mind.

The Reason I'm Not A Neurobiologist But A Cognitive Psychologist Is That I Think Looking At Brain Tissue Is Often The Wrong Level Of Analysis. You Have To Look At A Higher Level Of Organization.

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Cameron Mathison

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